30 in 30: Day One: Selfie/90 Seconds

Aleathia says:

Here I am, the world's laziest blogger! My intentions are grand and my follow through, meh. I have been working diligently writing a novel which is in part why this blog has lagged this time. I have been writing poetry as well. Art projects fill my house. Walking. Pokemon. Getting healthy!

This project I am calling 30 in 30. Each day I will be posting a prompted photograph and a prompted story. Sometimes they are parallel to each other, sometimes perpendicular. The stories are flash fiction as I am allowed one side of a sheet of paper to write a story. Challenges folks, you have to put the screws to yourself once in awhile. Enjoy!

Photo "Selfie":

Story (what can happen in a second):

90 Seconds They ducked into the stoop of the closed cafe a second before the sky opened up with the wrath of an unseen god. The ferocity of the thunder rattled Cynthia’s bones. Next to her, George didn’t seem phased in the slightest having spent a lifetime amidst the cornfields of Iowa. Storms there meant life and food on the table and he never gave them a regretful thought. The two nearly strangers were tucked in close, elbow to elbow. They had “talked” for months through various social medias. Cynthia regretted this was the only way people like to meet anymore and longed for the bygone times when people met in all their awkwardness in person. It was easier to weed out the weirdos that way. Electronically, the two had investigated each other. Lists were checked off, probabilities weighed, before they decided to finally appear in human form. They both knew they were more gregarious and brave through the glowing screens in front of their noses. They could be themselves without fear of rejection or ridicule, however, they had not planned on reality. Cynthia found George incredibly handsome and rugged, but in person his charm was lacking and his conversation skills stunted. She spent much of the dinner driving their exchanges and waited for him to lead, just once. It made her feel like she was boring and that whatever interest he had in her virtually had been squandered sitting across from him. Huddled under the awning, their bodies close, but with so much silence between their mouths. When George leaned over to whisper in Cynthia’s ear he felt his heart rip out of his chest onto the sidewalk with the rain washing away his blood and courage. He was trying to find a shadow of his bravado he had online to tell her how much he loved listening to her speak, watching her mouth form words, and they way she bit her bottom lip when she was nervous. He liked her, a lot. He choked on his words as his mind went blank. Now, he was just a weirdo breathing heavy. Cynthia felt something strange in her ear and turned her head quickly. Her skull collided with George's nose and blood rushed down onto his clean white Oxford shirt. “Oh, god. Oh, I’m so sorry.” Cynthia said as she tried help stop the hemorrhage. He clutched his nose, embarrassed, and knew he had ruined any chance with her. Great, she thought, I mortally wounded him. There goes that.

***

Check back daily for more photos and stories. Note, I do work so there might be a lag on those days. As always, thanks for reading.

Aleathia

Quills and Frills-6/21/2014 Writing Prompt

Ally says:

The River Fell in Love

Maybe it was the boots. Or the clothes, or the current.

It probably didn’t matter. The first time the water closed over his head, he almost laughed, a smile underwater, the green swish swash of the river slipping between his teeth and patting his tongue, but then he came back up, spitting an arc of green water into the sky. It hit the setting sun at the peak and then broke apart splattering like rain back into the low waves. Each drop chasing after its sister, pit, pit, pit.

The fluidity of water always amazed him. The way it came apart and back together, the way it finds itself, recognized its other, like mercury does.

All the water in the world leaked out of a cracked meteorite when the earth was a firestorm – a raging baby ball of a planet. It was cooled by this liquid life, flowing out like the yolk of an egg cracked over the pan. Water, water everywhere.

He titled back, trying to float. A body at rest. His feet, boot-clad, dipped down and back and down and back, a boat – his whole body a vessel adrift. Inside he was mostly water and he could feel that water pushing against his skin, calling out to its other. The river and his water-blood reached out, touching fingertips, tearful like teenage lovers being wrenched apart.

His head went under again. The river smiled. The river played him a song – not one of lovers or heroes, which is usually the only kind of song the river likes to play but instead under a fat yellow moon the river played him a song about a boy, afloat; a boy, under a blackness punched through with starlight. A boy just like you, the river sang.

His feet go down first, weighed down in his river-soaked socks and boots. It pulls at him teasingly, like a lover begging him not to leave the bed at the sound of the telephone in the kitchen. Stay, she says. Wait, she says, giggling and he laughs too, stalks of river grass pulled from the bank tickle his cheek.

Stay, she coos, pulling at the sheets that have tangled his naked waist, tripping him up, running a long sharp finger down his spine. Not enough to hurt but enough to leave just a white scrape through the finest layer of his skin. A mark.

A claiming.

The sky shimmers now, light shifting, reflected again and again, in each individual drop. His shirt floats up over his head and he tries to shed it but it proves too stubborn. His legs twist with the current and again the river smiles, lifting her boy in a dance. A tumbling dance. Over and under and over and under and dip and lean and bend and sway. He is a good dancer and learns the steps quickly and the river is pleased and pretends she is as vast as her mother, the ocean, and she does the same pirouette – the same cartwheel, head, legs, head, legs that she has seen her mother do. Twirl, my beautiful boy, twirl.

The boy jerks, spasms, once, then again. The river reaches inside, kisses him, on the lips, into the mouth, down the throat, the river kisses deep again and again. The boy closes his eyes and when he opens them but the moon is gone, the water dark on all sides, the planet indescribably old.

He feels the river hug him, hard, pressing against his sides. He tries to turn away from her kisses, but she twirls him again, and tells him she is in love. She pulls off one shoe and he bobs for a second, close to the surface. He can see the moon again, briefly, before the moon becomes just another spot that floats before his eyes, just another drop of water separated and then rejoined in a message whispered between this world and the Nothingness. High above, the moon looks down at him and smiles. The moon is always happy when his daughters find new love. Everyone deserves to be loved, the moon, thinks, tilting his eyes from the fading boy and returning his gaze to all that never ending blackness. 


Aleathia says:

In 1993 my friends took me to a hot spring for my birthday that required a river crossing.  I nearly drown.  It was an eye opening experience that spawned a novella which will someday turn into a novel.  But today, you get a poem.



Vestige

I am a flesh accordion
being put away for the night
as cold water seeps over and under
my feet simultaneously.  It is mercury.
I rise up, levitate, as if a cheap trick
at the magician’s fingers.

I am a river bottom vestige
when my body quietly slips
beneath a watery sky,
from ink to ink, writing an epitaph
on the rocks with my knees
about a life not yet lived.

Aleathia Drehmer

Quills and Frills-5/24/2014 Writing Prompt

Savory
by Ally Malinenko

Wet cardboard. Warm wet cardboard.

Think of wet cardboard – where it’s pulpy on top, a mushy consistency but the bottom is still firm and then leave the whole thing in the sun so that it’s baked warm to the touch.

That will give you some idea of what this is like when I actually put a slice of pizza in my mouth. The bigger problem is that it still smells just like pizza. Mouth-watering cheesy delicious pizza.

This is life without the sense of taste – the life I now live.

In the beginning I thought it was a just a cold.

I woke one day and the pancakes on my plate at the diner tasted – well... puffy. Only puffy. Like biting into a mouse-sized mattress. It was spongy and soft. Springy even. But there was no taste.

I put the fork down.

“What?” my girlfriend asked. She sat across from me both eating and thumbing through her phone.

“These don’t taste like anything.”

She rolled her eyes, speared a piece of pancake from my plate with her fork and popped it into her mouth. I watched the muscles of her jaw work.

“They taste like pancakes,” she said swallowing. “You’re probably getting a cold. Don’t be sick for Sunday’s thing. I know you don’t want to go but I promised Denise.”

I nodded, dipping a finger into the pool of syrup on the plate. I licked only cold mucus. Slime trailed down my throat.

Next was pasta. Noodles were worms. Spaghetti sauce has the same consistency as Elmer’s glue. Onion were slugs – hard on the outside and then a pop of warm mush inside. I gagged on those.

She ordered Chinese food. I got nothing from it but the slick acrid oil from the fry cooker. Vegetables gave me only something elemental – dirt and root, the birthing bed of life.

Every beverage was water. Coffee was hot water. Wine was cursed by some hypocritical bastard deity. Scotch on rocks was the first thing that gave me something – but that something was only the bitter tart left over of rubbing alcohol.

At first I panicked. I took swigs of hot sauce. My throat raged in fire but otherwise nothing. My tongue lay inside my mouth – a dead useless thing.

For the first few months I took over cooking. I over-salted, over-spiced everything. My girlfriend burst into tears at the dinner table while I raged in the kitchen.

When we made love, the sweet tang of her skin – the taste of her - was lost to me. I mourned that one most of all.

Eventually I stopped eating. Food had no meaning without taste. My weight dropped severely. My once toned body withered.

The doctor told me not to worry. He gave me brochures that told me taste usually returns. It would all be over in a year or two at the latest. A year or two? My stomach roiled. Was I supposed to live two years like this?
"Is it ever permanent?" I asked.
In answer, he pressed his pillowy lips together until they were nothing more than a white line.

Time passed. In small doses I sometimes found something. One time ginger popped in my mouth, barking attention from listless taste buds. I nearly died that day. It wasn’t much but it was something. Every forkful was another shot fired in this war. When I got something from food, it was a gift. I cursed myself for not appreciating it before.

“I think I got this,” my girlfriend said when I opened the door to our apartment. She stood over the range, enveloped in the aromatic wafting scent of something Indian. She looked stunning, her dark hair, her large eyes. I dropped my bag to the floor and wrapped my arms around her, nuzzling the nape of her neck. I pressed my lips to her skin and inhaled the scent of her. I wanted to tell her I loved her. To thank her for trying. To apologize for what our life had become but she’s too busy detailing the ingredients in the pan before her. I let my tongue just graze her skin. Give me something, please. Just the salt of her, I’ll take that even.  I close my eyes.

“I checked with the Doctor. He agreed that it was worth a shot. We’re going to wake that tongue of yours up, baby,” she said, adding another large dollop of yogurt sauce and curry to the mixture. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

Nothing. Not even the salty flavor of her sweat. Her flesh was no different than the chicken she pushed around that pan. I tell her I won’t worry. I turn towards the spice rack and open the hot sauce. I shake some onto my tongue. I let it sit there like a pill I can’t swallow. And I pray to a god I’m starting to hate.


Untitled
by Joseph Bouthiette Jr.

This is how I learned to fall.

Maybe I’m losing weight, maybe I’m stumbling in a loss of my sense of weight. Or maybe I’m losing my sense of the ground. The ground, our perpendicular lover, but I’m growing more acquainted with her with every fall. Through her, the continents rumble and through me, the outpour of freshly opened scrapes. With each step I risk embracing her once more, my inner ears spinning like clouds in the wind. I close my eyes in that moment of uncertainty.

Shall I remain firmly rooted in place? Or shall I fall, a sheep to my gravity’s shepherd? Then I open my eyes, spine clattering against hard earth and eyes full of clouds. Through her, the dirt, I now embrace my true love, her, the sky.

This is how I learned to fly.

[Author's note: this is a remix of sorts of my prose poem "How I Learned to Fly" which can be read in its original form here. Stole a lot of lines from it that I liked for this piece on the loss of the sense of balance. Both are needlessly abstract and silly, but enjoy!]

Trampoline
By Aleathia Drehmer

Bonita was exceptionally clumsy.  Her mother had reminded her of this fact whenever she could and the opportunity arose often.  She used to tell Bonita that grace stopped by while she was sleeping and never bothered coming back.  It was not very surprising when Bonita awoke on the stretcher in the Emergency Room with her face bandaged.

The last thing she remembered was jumping on the trampoline with her friends.  She daringly did a back flip, feeling invincible as she bounced so high, and now she was here.  The ER was noisy—so many bells and whistles, so much chatter between patients and families, and medical banter of doctors.  Bonita looked around the room.  She could barely see over the bulky dressing across her nose.  There was a pain there like insipid fire, yet, she wasn’t really in pain.

Her mother sat there beside the bed with a look on her face that was equal parts irritation, “I hope you’re ok” and “I told you so”.  She said nothing to Bonita, so she said nothing back to her mother.  In their shared silence Bonita noticed she couldn’t smell anything.

It’s just the bandage, she told herself.

Well if it is just the bandage smarty then how come you can’t smell the gauze or the blood? She questioned.

She was very puzzled, but at 14 years old what did she know about noses and a person’s sense of smell?  All she knew was that her nose hurt and her face wasn’t too far behind it the longer she lay there in wonder.    Bonita counted the dots in the ceiling tiles while she waited in the swirl of noise around her. The doctor came into the room and told Bonita’s mother, not Bonita, that her nose was broken and there was nothing they could do about it.  She would have to see the specialist in a week.

Bonita cringed.  Specialist.  That meant a lot of money and she knew that her mother didn’t have the cash to pay for any of this.  She suddenly felt tiny inside as if she were a painfully heavy burden on her mother.  The doctor suddenly looked her in the eyes, standing over her smiling and chuckled.  “And you young lady are going to have a pair of black eyes.  Don’t blow your nose or there will be bleeding.”  Bonita nodded at the doctor and thought it was strange he thought this was all funny.  She did not mention her loss of smell.  She didn’t think it was permanent anyway.

The week passed and Bonita wore the purple badge across her face awkwardly.  Her friends made jokes and Bonita laughed as she always did when she hurt herself being clumsy, but inside she felt a darkness brewing.  Her food was tasteless and bland no matter how much salt or spice she used.  She could not smell the lilacs blooming beneath her bedroom window, or smell the early summer air with its sticky heaviness.  Bonita couldn’t even smell her brother’s horrid gym sneakers that he left closed up in the bathroom.  She was sort of glad of it, but at the same time it was a scent that told the story of her life.

The specialist told her she was fine when she mentioned she couldn’t smell properly.  He told her sometimes that happens with trauma, but he assured her it would come back.  Anosmia he said.  That was the real word for it.  He expected her to look impressed, but she struggled with the concept.  What will I do if I can’t ever smell again? She thought.

Many more weeks passed and Bonita became sullen.  She could smell nothing and the world slipped by her as if she were not even there.  She could not identify with the everyday workings of her own life.  It felt desolate and all her natural joy at being alive drained away into the grass she was standing on but could not smell.  Bonita thought of dying.  She dreamed of smelling the blood and the last threads of air in her lungs as they collapsed on themselves.  It would be so much better than this torture, she thought, seeing the world and not enjoying it.  She stood there in the yard a long time with this final ending.  Bonita smiled and put her arms out as if to be taken up into the heavens.

Bonita!!! God damn it, for the last time, dinner is ready!! Her mother shouted from the window.

Not this time, she thought, not this time.

( These stories were written from a single prompt.  What if you freakishly lost one of your senses, what would your life be like?)

Quills and Frills-5/3/2014 Writing Prompt

Aleathia says:

The beauty of being human is that we get to express ourselves in any way we want to whether that be through word, voice, dance, art etc.  Here at The Forked Road we are going to have prompts each week for writing either poetry or fiction.  There are no rules really.  Just have fun.  The idea was to see how Michelle and I view the same prompt from our very different life styles and experiences in the world.

Here is my go at the prompt:  You are an astronaut, describe your perfect day.

It Was All A Dream

Space was always an extravagance in the mind.  Growing up with television shows that depicted the universe as another place where wars were fought—won and lost, and civilizations much like my own were demolished based on culture and creed.  As a child, it was both frightful and wondrous to think of space, to think of escaping into the unknown.  I wanted to find uncharted territories and leave this heartache behind me.

Nothing could truly prepare me for this moment.

In space, life is weightless in so many ways; reality anchored in hibernation trapped inside this capsule.  My sense of time distorted and elongated as I peer out the window into the deep dark stretches of universe.  I am amongst the stars which are soon to be suns in their own rite; centers of new solar systems eternally creating themselves.  I have yet to see an alien from my youth or a swash buckling space pirate or feel the sense of danger around every corner like in the movies, but it is enough.

I float to the other side of the capsule and there is home, Earth, so spectacular from this distance, so peaceful and organic in its innocence.  It is my only thread to the life that I once had.  When I leave this place I will be someone new, someone no one will ever really know again.  My head will forever be fogged with stars and drifting back to the sky.

Aleathia Drehmer 2014